Ponce City Market, the mixed-use community hub in Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward neighborhood, has teamed up with Spalding Nix Fine Art to host a photography pop-up gallery this month featuring works from renowned artists Landon Nordeman, Spencer Sloan and Jerry Siegel. Curated by local art expert and gallerist Spalding Nix of Spalding Nix Fine Art, the pop-up will be open through the end of March, and is located between Ponce Denim Company and COCO + MISCHA.
Looking for the eternal in the ephemeral, NYC-based Landon Nordeman is one of the world’s most sought-after fashion photographers. He has photographed events from the Oscars to the Met Gala, and his images have been featured in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The New Yorker, National Geographic and many more. Though his photographs often appear staged, Nordeman pulls back the curtains to give viewers a look into backstage scenes where his subjects are shown in candid moments that are surreal and even surprising. His first monograph, “Out of Fashion,” was published by Damiani in 2016 and was named one of the best photo books of 2016 by TIME.

Jerry Siegel’s most recent body of work is titled “REVEAL” and celebrates Atlanta’s community of drag artists. He is a portrait and documentary photographer whose monograph “Black Belt Color,” features images from decades documenting his hometown of Selma, Alabama, and the surrounding area. These images set forth the unique cultural landscape of that area, known as the Black Belt. His photographs are in many private and corporate collections, including those of the Ogden Museum of Art, the Birmingham Museum of Art as well as eleven other Southeastern museums. Works from both “REVEAL” and “Black Belt Color” are on display at Ponce City Market.

Spencer Sloan is an Atlanta native whose background as a pop-culture blogger led to the creation of his most recent abstract work. For this show, Sloan has digitally manipulated paparazzi photographs into abstraction using a series of image-corrupting applications. Creating works that are large in scale and made with digital bursts of color, patterns and noise-induced shapes, Sloan’s experimentation results in distinctive photographs which reflect on the chaos that is pop culture. Most recently, Sloan completed a large-scale “digital noise” commission for Dolby’s headquarters in San Francisco.

“There is a thread that ties all three artists together – our obsession with celebrity culture,” says Nix. “Landon shows us new perspectives in the world of celebrities – often mysteriously hiding them in plain sight. The drag artists create the illusion of celebrity in intimate behind-the-scenes photographs by Jerry Siegel, and Spencer Sloan destroys paparazzi photos of celebrities to create something new, abstract and beautiful from annihilated celebrity candids. These artists don’t attack our obsession with celebrity culture, but encourage us to examine it in new ways.”